Catena is a word that means, ‘connected series or chain,’ and is also the appropriate name for the broadcast industry’s answer to a problem that has only grown more acute with the rise of IP, cloud, and hybrid workflows: fragmented, insecure, and proprietary device control. Developed under SMPTE’s Rapid Industry Solutions Open Services Alliance (RIS-OSA) and recently introduced into SMPTE’s formal standards process, Catena aims to deliver ‘a single secure protocol for control of media devices and services,’ providing a unified, vendor and platform agnostic control plane.
"The reason Catena exists, and why so much work has been put into this, is to try to solve the mess that exists today—and that is only getting worse—with the registration, discovery and control of devices and services," says Chris Lennon, Director of Standards Strategy at Ross Video and SMPTE Fellow. He emphasises that modern media operations span "on‑prem, cloud, and hybrid environments," yet each new service or device typically brings yet another proprietary API...
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